Going Gradeless and Getting Better Writing Conferences!

I had my first more formal writing conferences today with students under my new gradeless regime. (Read about it here, here, and here.) So they all wrote complete rough drafts. I gave them all feedback. I provided rubrics (just a list of the CCSS that the assignment targets) but did not mark anything on the rubrics. And this week, they are working on thorough revisions of those drafts.

The thorough revision assignment asks them to do a few things: highlight all the changes they make. Put comments in the margin (via google docs) to explain the thinking behind them. Write a paragraph at the end of the revised draft that explains which three standards from the rubric they targeted for their revisions and how those standards guided their revision work.

I had over half of my class today (optional day–paper work session). In 70 minutes, I was able to have a meaty conference with each of them as they worked. I came prepared with copies of the rubric and the instructions for the revisions. I started with the students I knew needed the most help, and these are the questions I used to get students talking with me about their writing:

Let’s look at my feedback on your draft? What do you want to work on in the revision?

So which of these standards then do you think address what you need to work on?

Which three standards do you want to choose to guide your revision work?

And finally, here they were taking control of the thinking about their writing. THEY were identifying the focus for their revision. THEY were struggling with the rubric to figure out what they could do well and what they wanted to work on to improve. THEY were making plans to guide their own revision work. They were ALL doing the grunt work of becoming better writers–they were re-seeing, re-evaluating, re-working their writing. They were thinking carefully about feedback and using it to make plans to improve their work.

In the past, I’ve given feedback, marked up the rubric, gave them a grade, invited them to revise if they weren’t happy with the grade. Those who chose to pretty much just fixed the mechanical stuff but didn’t really engage in the piece of writing that much for the revision. They did just enough to bring up their grade if they weren’t happy with it.

This increased engagement and ownership in the writing process I saw today–is it simply because there’s no grade at stake here on this paper? That’s some of it. But I think it’s more complex than that. In the process of going gradeless, I’ve had to define the learning objectives differently than in the past–if success is not determined by a certain number of points acquired, then what is it based on? Hence, I built a rubric that is a list of the CCSS that the piece of writing targets. In the process of going gradeless, I’ve had to figure out how to get my students really thinking about those CCSS that lay out the learning objectives for our course so that individual students and I can both be on the same page about how well s/he is doing. Hence, I asked THEM to use the rubric to determine which standards they think their work shows they can do and which ones they need to work on rather than me marking up the rubric to identify this for them. In the process of going gradeless, I wanted to figure out how to get my students focused on the WORK and not the GRADE. Hence, the assignment that requires all students to do thorough revision work of all major papers.

And all of this helped influence the meaningful writing conferences I had today. We had plenty to talk about. Students were intensely engaged in the conferences. We were REALLY talking about their writing and their thinking about it.

They showed ownership in the process at a level I’ve not seen before.

I can’t ask for more than that.

But I did tweet this at the end of class (exhausted after about 15 intense conferences in 70 minutes):

I’m such a jerk: I actually expect my second semester seniors to work. #zslcc